The Information Age is upon us. Access to vast quantities of information through a variety of different communication systems are changing the way people work, entertain themselves, and communicate with each other. For example, as a result of increased telecommunications competition mapped out by Congress in the 1996 Telecommunications Reform Act, traditional cable television program providers have evolved into full-service providers of advanced video, voice and data services for homes and businesses. A number of competing cable companies now offer cable systems that deliver all of the just-described services via a single broadband network.
These services have increased the need for bandwidth, which is the amount of data transmitted or received per unit time. More bandwidth has become increasingly important, as the size of data transmissions has continually grown. Applications such as in-home movies-on-demand and video teleconferencing demand high data transmission rates. Another example is interactive video in homes and offices.
Other industries are also placing bandwidth demands on Internet service providers, and other data providers. For example, hospitals transmit images of X-rays and CAT scans to remotely located physicians. Such transmissions require significant bandwidth to transmit the large data files in a reasonable amount of time. These large data files, as well as the large data files that provide real-time home video are simply too large to be feasibly transmitted without an increase in system bandwidth. The need for more bandwidth is evidenced by user complaints of slow Internet access and dropped data links that are symptomatic of network overload.
Internet service providers, cable television networks and other data providers generally employ conductive wires and cables to transmit and receive data. Conventional approaches to signal (i.e. data) transmission through a transmission medium, such as a wire or cable, is to modulate the signal though the medium at a frequency that lies within the bounds at which the medium can electrically conduct the signal. Because of this conventional approach, the bandwidth of a specific medium is limited to a spectrum within which the medium is able to electrically transmit the signal via modulation, which yields a current flow. As a result, many costly and complicated schemes have been developed to increase the bandwidth in conventional conductive wire and/or cable systems using sophisticated switching schemes or signal time-sharing arrangements. Each of these methods is rendered costly and complex in part because the data transmission systems adhere to the conventional acceptance that the bandwidth of a wire or cable is constrained by its conductive properties.
Therefore, there exists a need for a method to increase the bandwidth of conventional wired networks.